How often are the Tribune’s editorial board meetings halted as the roar of jet aircraft overhead makes conversation impossible? I’ll bet the answer is “almost never,” just like the answer to questions about editorial board members losing sleep or having to soundproof their homes because of jet noise.
Which is why the editorial writer who penned the recent critique of the Illinois Appellate Court’s decision to grant public access to government planning documents (“A prescription for chaos,” Nov. 10) should have spent a week or two out here with us NIMBY types before mocking us and, by implication, our objections to additional high-decibel assaults on our environment, lifestyles and property values.
It has become fashionable to deprecate opponents of any government project, however questionable its need or value, by calling them NIMBYs. Perhaps proponents of such projects should also be labeled: How about ISEBYs (In Somebody Else’s Back Yard)? It would be the fair thing to do, especially since their enthusiasm for a project seems to increase in proportion to its distance from their own homes, neighborhoods or communities.
Almost obscured by the editorial’s NIMBY-bashing, however, is the more insidious argument that concealing government planning documents from the public, especially those citizens and communities most affected by that planning, is essential for government to properly function.
Just how is the public “best served” by being kept ignorant of preliminary deliberations on O’Hare expansion or other projects that may lack broad public support or face pockets of strong opposition, a view the editorial attributes to Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan? Better that opponents of such projects gain access to relevant planning documents and hold “up to ridicule those that the public might find questionable, given the lack of context,” as the editorial bemoans, than that the grafters and special-interest insiders secretly lock up boondoggles and sweetheart deals before word of them finally surfaces, often on the eve of their formal approval.
The discoverability of planning documents should not discourage government planners or consultants from candidly presenting to decision-makers, both orally and in writing, any reasonable and responsible ideas and projects. And if it discourages the half-baked ideas and cronyism that already waste too many of our tax dollars, it won’t be a “prescription for chaos”; it will be a much-need prescription for better government.
